About Me: Theophilus A. Benson

I'm a fourth year graduate student in the C.S department at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I work with Prof Aditya Akella, my advisor, on networking and systems projects. Prior to starting graduate school I was working, in Waltham, MA, as a back-end software engineer/release engineer for a start-up called Open Ratings.

Research:

My General Research interest lie within systems and networks but my most recent work has been along the management, wireless and traffic engineering dimensions of Internet architecture.
  • Open Flow Our campus recently got a few openflow switches. I have been working on understanding the limitations of OpenFlow enabled switches. I am implementing data center architectures and enterprise management planes as components within NOX controllers.
  • Management Of Clouds Much effort has been spent on the provisioning and management of a Cloud's infrastructure; however, very little work has explored management and debugging of user applications. I am currently developing a set of primitives to speed up the process of debugging within a Cloud.
    [Joint work with Sambit Sahu @ IBMR]
  • Traffic Engineering In Data Centers Data Center remain a largely unexplored domain. The focus of this project is to understand and expose the characteristics of traffic in datacenters.
    [Joint work with Ming Zhang @ MSR]
  • Complexity In Enterprise Networks:Developing models that capture and quantify the complexity faced by network operators as they manage the configuration of an enterprise network.
    [Joint work with Dave Maltz @ MSR]
  • Proactive Fault Detection In Enterprise Networks: Designing a framework that automatically detects static and dynamic problems in enterprise devices.
    [Joint work with Sambit Sahu @ IBMR]

Publications:

Posters:

  • Phoenix: A System for Automatically Reconfiguring Networks,
    Usenix NSDI April 2009. (Poster).
  • Coordinated configuration of uncoordinated wireless networks: A win-win approach based on bargaining,
    ACM MOBICOM San Franciso,CA. April 2009.(Poster).

Awards & Fellowships:

  • University of Wisconsin (Madison) AOF Fellowship, 2006
  • Harry Cochrane/Cal White IBM Ph.D. Assitantship, 2009
  • IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, 2009

COURSE WORK:

Interesting classes that i've taken include:

  • Advanced Operating Systems
  • Advanced Networking
  • Wireless Networking
  • Machine Learning
  • Compilers & Java Byte Code

CV:

[PDF]

Contact:

Theophilus A. Benson
222 E Lakelawn Pl, #202
Madison, WI 53703
(617)642-6110
tbenson [at] cs [dot] wisc [dot] edu